D.C. Follies

The Power Game: How Washington works.
by Hedrick Smith.
Random House. 793 pp. $22.50.

Washington Goes to War.
by David Brinkley.
Knopf. 304 pp. $18.95.

As I write this, both The Power Game and Washington Goes to War are on the best-seller lists. Both deserve to be there. Every week I see several books on the nonfiction best-seller list that, I would bet, are not read through to the end by 10 percent of their purchasers. (We really need a best-read list in addition to the best-seller list.) The Brinkley and Smith books do not fall into that category. Both are enjoyable to read.

At one point I thought that Smith had made a mistake, from the standpoint of sales. He is a wonderful reporter with—to use a Washington term—great access. He has interviewed everyone, from Jack Albertine to Harry Zubkov, with many more familiar names in between. I count, from his footnotes, interviews with about 185 people. He gives pointed quotations from those interviews. Many of the stories he tells are new even to a long-time Washingtonian like myself who is a regular reader of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, including the gossip sections. He adds something to the public knowledge of some important developments, like the 1986 tax-reform act, the Iran-contra affair, and the decision to give up compliance with SALT II. Many of his pictures of the Washington scene are fascinating—the elaborate presidential entourage, helicopters and all, arriving for a quiet dinner with Howard Baker in Tennessee, or Congressmen lined up to tape their 60-second impressions of the State of the Union messages for their hometown TV stations.

Smith’s mistake, I thought, was to try to make the book look like a work on “political science.” All he would get for his pains would be reviews by political-science professors whose most popular works never sold over 2,000 copies and who would complain either (a) that Smith did not quote Tocqueville or (b) that he used no statistical regressions. That would not sell many books.

But Smith was right. Washington political groupies are unlike rock-music groupies or professional-basketball groupies. They want to think of themselves as serious students of the business of governing the world and at least vicarious participants in it. They would not go for a book called “Life Styles of Semi-Celebrities Within the Beltway.” So Smith has provided them with a cover, a brown paper wrapper, that enables them to feel virtuous while scouring the index for revelations about the names they know—or about themselves. I do not suppose anyone will look in the index to see what Hedrick Smith thinks about a six-year term for the President.

The lessons and prescriptions in the book are commonplace, and drawn more from the work of others than from Smith’s own observations. It could not be otherwise. One can no more learn about government by interviewing politicians than one can learn about ichthyology by interviewing fish.

If there is any generalization to be drawn from Smith’s stories, it concerns the irony in the title, The Power Game. The word “game” can be used in two metaphorical ways. For example, in The Pajama Game the pajamas are real but the game is not really a game, it is a business. In chess the game is really a game—it is pretending—but the pieces are not really knights and bishops. In the power game the power is not real but the pretense is.

One of the best descriptions of the Washington situation comes in a quotation in Smith’s book from Elliot Richardson: “Washington is really, when you come right down to it, a city of cocker spaniels. . . . It’s a city of people who are more interested in being petted and admired than in rendering the excess of power.”

The Power Game is full of stories of people who, according to Smith, are adept at exercising power—but who in fact fail to get what they want. Smith gives an admiring account of Senator Paula Hawkins’s skill in publicizing herself through a hearing on pornographic rock music. He does not remind us that she failed of reelection. He describes the power of the military-industrial complex, but does not explain how the defense budget came to be cut so sharply after 1985. In general, the account written from the standpoint of a Washington journalist underestimates the influence of what is going on outside Washington.

The Power Game would thus have more accurately been called The Power Exchange, on the analogy of the stock exchange. The operators in the stock exchange do not own the stock or the money; they facilitate transactions among those who do. Similarly, the operators in Washington do not have the power; they make transactions among those who do—mainly people with votes, money, or organizations. There are some exceptions, but the generalization is correct.

Revealingly, the archetypical Washington operator is called a power broker. One of the best of these, Robert Strauss, gives a good account here of the ascending circles of power. First there is going to a political dinner, then there is helping to put on a political dinner, then there is staying at the candidate’s hotel in a convention city, then there is standing in the hall outside of Sam Rayburn’s suite, then there is being in the living room of the candidate’s suite. “And finally, I was invited in the bedroom with the last eight or ten fellas, and then I knew I was on the inside—until I finally learned that they stepped into the John. In the end, just me and Jimmy Carter and Hamilton Jordan made the final decision in the John.” But what powerful decision they made there, we are not told.

Smith’s book tends to confirm the evolving picture of Ronald Reagan as President. He is shown as having a few firm ideas, the implications of which he is reluctant to explore, and as being indifferent to other matters. But that is now history, or nearly so, and later historians will confirm or contradict this picture. For the present there is more interest in any hints about George Bush.

The Vice President appears in The Power Game mainly as one in a group of people who meet regularly with the President. But the few instances we get of Bush’s individual performance show him in a more positive light than much current journalism would suggest. For example, Bush has used a weekly private luncheon with Reagan “as a vital channel for giving Reagan confidential advice (among other things, I was told, urging Reagan to travel to China in 1984 and to move quickly in 1985 toward a summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev).” Again, during discussions of mismanagement in the Department of Defense, Bush brought Reagan thirty yards of diagrams showing communications circuits in the Pentagon; he told the President that Eisenhower had waged World War II with a staff of 300, but we cannot now wage the peace with a Joint Staff of 3,000. And when, after Reagan’s surgery in 1985, Donald Regan, at the urging of Nancy Reagan, advised Bush to stay away in Maine on vacation, Bush ignored the advice.

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David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War, which is set in the 1940’s, does not show the ambition to be a work of history or political science that The Power Game does. True, Brinkley has an ambitious subtitle, “The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City and a Nation,” but he makes no attempt to live up to it, and could not if he tried. He has written the book that dozens of readers of Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington, about the Civil War, must have wanted to write about our times. But his book does not have the sweetness I associate with Reveille in Washington. To a remarkable degree, it translates to the printed page the personal style we associate with Brinkley on television—amused, dismissive, belittling. Whether despite or because of that style, the book has charm.

Brinkley’s story is of a Washington that was a “sleepy Southern city” in the early days of World War II and became a metropolis at the center of the world by the time the war ended. Why a young man from Wilmington, North Carolina thought Washington was a “sleepy Southern city” is unclear. I thought it when I came to Washington in 1938, but I came from Chicago. “Sleepy Southern city” seems to be the standard cliché. People who came to Washington in 1960 now say it was a sleepy Southern city then. I suppose the residents of Georgetown in 1800 later said that it was a sleepy Southern city before the capital moved in next door.

Brinkley’s vignettes of various aspects of life in Washington during the war—the “high society,” the embassies, the press, the Congress, the crowding, the racism—are informative, sometimes shocking, often fascinating. One of the most amazing of his stories is about Amy Pack, code-name “Cynthia,” an American Mata Hari who helped the British steal the German code machine—“the most successful intelligence achievement of the war”—and performed other feats of espionage.

Unlike Smith, Brinkley has no footnotes. In some cases, one would have liked to know his sources, either to check on the truth of his stories or to learn more about them. I detect a few errors about economics. For example, he says that Congressmen were worried about a postwar depression because they did not understand the “presumed Keynesian virtues of huge spending and borrowing and piling up debt. . . .” But it was precisely the Keynesians who were most certain there would be a postwar depression, and the non-Keynesians who disagreed. Such errors are inconsequential, but they leave the reader wondering about other statements in the book.

Brinkley emphasizes change and drama. But he passes over the element of continuity, which may be the dull part of the story but seems important to me, perhaps because that was the past I lived in. Before the war there were tens of thousands of people at all levels to whom Washington was the scene of a great and challenging economic policy enterprise. They were also aware of the rising threat of Hitler. After the war came, these people made up the core of the defense agencies that had been established and had grown even before Pearl Harbor. They lived in the suburban houses they had always lived in, they came into town in more or less the way they always had, and they applied themselves to new tasks with diligence and expertise. They remained in Washington to perform the postwar tasks. They are a key part of the continuing, although evolving, Washington industry whose product is government and which is regularly overlooked in inside-Washington books.

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Both in Smith’s book and in Brinkley’s, Washington comes out as a scene of confusion, conflict, and incompetence. And in the cases of both books, the reader is left with the same question: “If so, does it matter?” Despite the mess that Brinkley sees in Washington during the war, a great military force was created, the economy was mobilized to devote almost 50 percent of the Gross National Product to defense, it was then demobilized with only a minor recession, and inflation for the whole period averaged only about 6 percent a year. The record of the period Smith covers is not yet in, but on the whole the country is getting along well despite the inanities and vanities he describes.

Perhaps the answer was given by another Smith, Adam, who said that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. He did not say that there is an infinite amount of ruin in a nation. It may be that we are suffering a serious disease, located in Washington; but if so, neither the diagnosis nor the cure will be found in these two delightful books.

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